Jesus becomes "real to me" at the Sea of Galilee

I arrived this morning in Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee. It is so odd to be traveling between these biblical locations -- going from Nazareth to Tiberias -- which are both still places where people actually live, not just the ancient remains of what once was. It is this continuity with the past that is the most meaningful to me when visiting sites of historic significance -- the fact that those places are STILL places where people live and work -- like Istanbul and Athens and Thessaloniki and Rome all were on my foreign study trip in college in 2003.

As our bus crested the hill at the top of the mountains, I got my first glimpse of the Sea of Galilee, stretching out before me like a big blue glittering pool. After we arrived in the bus station, I walked down to the boardwalk area of Tiberias, and saw a large fishing boat sitting not far out from the shore. "Wow, here we are!" I thought to myself. "At the Sea of Galilee, with a fishing boat! How perfect!"

I picked up my rental car and drove to the northern shore of the lake, where the guesthouse is where I will be staying. Along the way, I passed signs for many of the religious sites along the shores of the lake.

I wasn't aware before arriving that the Sea of Galilee is located below sea level -- think Death Valley, California -- in other words, where it is VERY HOT. The outside temperature gauge on my car registered 33 ˚C when I left Tiberias, and by the time I got to my guesthouse, it was reading 38˚C. I wasn't sure exactly how hot that was, but I knew that anything over 30 was HOT. (I later did the conversions and saw that it was between 90 and 100 degrees Farenheit, according to my car gauge.)

After getting settled in my room, I debated about what to do with the rest of the afternoon. It was just too hot to do much of anything. I checked the weather and saw that it was supposed to be cloudy on Saturday and a bit cooler. That looked like a good option for visiting the sites, and today I could just be a bit of a tourist. All I really wanted to do was go swimming. It was the kind of day where the only bearable place to be was in the water.

I jumped in my car and drove back down the hill and fairly quickly came upon a place with access to the water. Although they wanted 55 shekels to park the car (about $15.50), I didn't even care by this point because I was so hot. Once I got down to the water, I realized that a lot of people were camping on the beach here, and I wondered if I had paid for camping with a car. (I couldn't read any of the signs and the people at the gate didn't speak much English. The extent of our conversation was, "Excuse me, do you speak English?" "A little." "Is this like, a beach where you can actually get in the water?" "You want swimming?" "Yes!!!" "55 shekels for the car.") One of my bunk-mates at the guesthouse told me later that it's illegal for people to charge entrance to the lake, since it "belongs to everybody" as a national treasure and they really shouldn't be charging admission to these areas, but people do it anyway.

Amnun Bay, where I went swimming. Photo courtesy of TripAdvisor.com

In any case, I got to enjoy the lake for a few hours. There was one section of the beach that said it was not an "authorized swimming area," but it was full of people, so I went ahead and got in. There were tons of college-age looking Israelis, sitting on rafts and drinking beer and listening to dance music BLASTING from speakers on the shore and laughing constantly. I swam around and looked out toward the middle of the lake and at the mountains rising on either side of it, and thought to myself, "I'm swimming in the Sea of Galilee! Jesus was actually HERE! This is where Peter fell in when he tried to walk on the water and didn't have enough faith. This is where Jesus calmed the winds and the sea…." All the Bible stories about Jesus in the Sea of Galilee region were floating through my head as I swam back and forth in this little area, the partying college kids behind me.

I realized, as I meditated, that I didn't really know what to do with these thoughts, that I didn't really have anywhere to put them. Jesus was actually HERE? What? That doesn't make any SENSE! I realized the extent to which, until now, I hadn't really thought of Jesus as a real person. Sure, I knew he was a real historical figure, and I considered that fact very important to my religious faith. But on a practical level, in my mind he was of the same category as figures in storybooks, of cartoon characters, of people in the movies. The places Nazareth and Galilee might as well have been the Land of Oz -- places that were in a storybook somewhere but not really real. And yet here I was -- visiting those places -- which were not only real 2,000 years ago but very much real today. What did it mean, then, that this Jesus who healed and walked on water and fed five thousand people with two fish and five loaves of bread was a real, actual, flesh-and-blood human being whom the church claims was God incarnate and who once lived… RIGHT HERE???

Jesus Calling the Fishermen, Harry Anderson (1906-1996)

I know, this sounds like pretty basic stuff for someone who is in seminary to become a priest to be thinking about, but it was seriously a kind of revelatory moment. Nichole Nordeman sings about sorting through the "debates" and "doctrines" about Jesus, asking him to "be real to me now -- that's all I'm asking." This moment was the answer to that prayer… but in a different kind of way than I'd always thought about that song. I'd always thought the "realness" that she was searching for in that song was in a personal experience of "knowing Jesus in her heart," of that kind of "finding Jesus" or "meeting Jesus" moment that evangelical Christians speak about as crucial to their conversion experience. And it was with such a thing in mind that I'd often sung along with that song. "Be real to me" -- let me have an authentic experience of your (otherworldly) presence. But as I swam and floated in the Sea of Galilee, I realized that Jesus was becoming "real to me" in an entirely different way -- in his earthly, human presence, as a REAL human being who actually lived here, in this very area. It was an insight that somehow I'd missed until now, and it took swimming in the Sea of Galilee with a bunch of partying Israelis to figure it out.